Organization

The first two chapters generally present material in order of increasing complexity. Otherwise, the book jumps around a lot. Use the table of contents and the index, and keep a good Perl reference (the man pages or Programming Perl ) handy.

The way the examples in this book are formatted isn't particularly mysterious , but I should mention a few things. Snippets of code and short examples appear inlined in the text:

 print "This is an example.\n"; 

This is a comment.

Longer or especially significant examples appear in boxes:

Important examples appear in boxes.

Pay attention to the code below.
print "This is an important example!\n";	This is another comment.

Square bullets indicate boxes that demonstrate good practices or do s. Inverted triangles indicate boxes that demonstrate poor practices or don't s. Circular bullets indicate boxes containing material of a more general nature.

In some cases, I suggest running an example program. If I don't specify a name , the program is called tryme . Keyboard input (the stuff you're supposed to type) appears in bold typewriter font. Command lines begin with a % prompt:

 print "Enter the magic number: ";  if (<> == 7) {    print "Magic mode on!\n";  } else {    print "Nothing happens.\n";  }  %  tryme  Enter the magic number:  7  Magic mode on!